Tipping points and a path to more effective mentoring
By Jean Rhodes
In a recent JAMA psychiatry paper, Boston University researchers described a very effective strategy for helping depressed, overwhelmed low-income young women engage in active problem solving. In just six 45 minute one-on-one sessions, the women learned how to discuss the daily “sticky points” in their lives and then, as the lead author described, “go through a step-by-step process that involves taking big problems and boiling them down to little problems.” In a randomized study, the women who had learned these active problem solving strategies experienced a 40% reduction in symptoms of depression, including feeling less sad and experiencing fewer sleep problems. And, as the problem-solving strategies were learned and practiced, they became self-reinforcing and were applied to new situations.
The field of mentoring mentoring would do well to incorporate tools like these for youth struggling with depression or other challenges. Even targeted single- session interventions (SSI’s) for youth have yielded moderate effect sizes (0.32) notably larger than those found in long- term mentoring interventions. In her excellent new book “Little Treatments, Big Effects” psychologist Jessica Schleider describes how, in a single-session, young people can gain skills that lead to lasting change.
As Schleider and her colleagues note: “the integration of SSIs and mentor-delivered programs [is] a promising future step to further overcome the inaccessibility of youth mental health services. Capitalizing on the advantages of mentoring relationships (e.g., the associated interpersonal benefits and mentors’ pre-existence in most community settings) has the potential to complement and enhance the value of SSIs, and to expand the acceptability and reach of evidence-based mental health services. Building on this, our team has been developing SSI’s that teach youth skills for recruiting natural mentors.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being a friendly and responsive companion to a young person. Trust and connection are the basis of all relationships. But a warm, trusting bond may not change the underlying processes that lead youth to be referred to mentoring programs.
We may look back on this era of less targeted, intuitive approaches to mentoring with regret that we held so fast to models and practices that were not well supported by evidence. Malcolm Gladwell has described a “magic moment” when an idea, trend, or approach “crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” The evidence for more targeted approaches to mentoring has been piling up for years. Eventually it will tip scales in that direction.
